Live from SAPinsider Studio: Movado Discusses Upgrade From Legacy System to Integrated Shipping Solution
The Movado Group’s Mitch Spaner, Senior Manager of Global IT Business Solutions, and Maria Carbone, Senior Manager of Distributed Shared Services, join SAPinsider Studio at the SCM 2016 event in Las Vegas along with Joseph Cabrera, Partner at ERP Integrated Solutions, to discuss their recent project to upgrade their legacy point shipping solution with ERP Integrated Solutions’ ShipERP.
Here is an edited transcript of the discussion:
Natalie Miller, SAPinsider: Hi this is Natalie Miller with SAPinsider and we’re here at the SCM, CRM, and IoT event in Las Vegas. Today, I’m joined by some folks from The Movado Group. We have Mitch Spaner, Senior Manager of Global IT Business Solutions at Movado, and Maria Carbone, Senior Manager of Distributed Shared Services, and we also have Joseph Cabrera, who is a Partner at ERP Integrated Solutions.
Hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here with me today.
Maria Carbone, The Movado Group: Thank you for having us.
Natalie: I was hoping we could start; I’m sure everyone knows the Movado brand, but if you could just start by giving a little bit of background on the company, that’d be great.
Maria: Sure, so Movado is actually celebrating 135 years this year. We have nine watch brands under our umbrella. Movado is our most recognizable brand. We have two luxury brands, Concord and EBEL, and then we have our license brands, which are Coach, Tommy [Hilfiger], Juicy [Couture], Lacoste, [Scuderia] Ferrari, and HUGO BOSS.
Natalie: We are here talking about the ShipERP solution, but I’d like to start, if you could run through some of the shipping challenges that you were experiencing back in 2014 before this project.
Mitch Spaner, The Movado Group: We had a point shipping solution that only covered our US and Canadian operations. We needed something that was a global ship system and was native to SAP. We also had challenges like our dimensional rating, which we didn’t have capabilities for, and we also wanted to eliminate unwanted services from a third party system as well.
Maria: Some of the challenges, to Mitch’s point, would be that we couldn’t ship through UPS World Ease, Swiss Post, and also Swiss Customs. We needed an integrated system. We were working with ZT codes in order to do our write backs, and we didn’t have much automation with that system. Some of our other challenges were dimensional weight ratings — we did not have that ability with our old system — as well as rate shopping.
Mitch: We had the desire to bring our application and development people that were knowledgeable in SAP into this project as well and have them support the project. We were also looking for additional planning capabilities that we did not have with our legacy system.
Natalie: In terms of the evaluation process, can you walk us through some of the reasons why you chose ShipERP?
Mitch: Yes. We wanted a solution that could interface directly to the small parcel carriers like FedEx and UPS. We needed a solution that was native to SAP; we needed a solution that provided us with some web capabilities to interface with our carriers. Maria, if you wanted to add something?
Maria: I also think one of the decision points was because they were able to provide us with a solution that was specific to a FedEx service that’s called IPD, which our company uses daily. They seemed to be the only solution that could provide us that.
Natalie: Joe, my next question is for you. Supply chain solutions, as far as SAP is concerned, is an area of expertise for ERP Integrated Solutions, correct?
Joseph Cabrera, ERP Integrated Solutions: Yes, that’s correct. We specialize in supply chain solutions around the transportation and compliance area. We have a multi-carrier, multi-mode shipping solution that resides right in the SAP ERP as well as the SAP EWM platforms, so it allows for seamless integration between the carriers and your SAP system without having to have any kind of third-party systems, which is what Movado was using at the time we engaged with them. So that was a big advantage of our solution for them.
Our solution blends those types of compliance and transportation solutions so that it’s a nice package for customers that need targeted services in the compliance area but also full transportation management capabilities.
Natalie: In terms of implementation, can you talk a little bit about that, when the go-live was, and how the implementation went?
Maria: Sure. We went live about a year ago and our implementation started in October of 2014. That’s when we started our blueprint phase. We had a four-person team that was a mix of technical and business people. It only took us four months to get the entire project completed from start to end.
Natalie: Can you talk a little bit about how the ShipERP solution solved some of the challenges that you were talking about before?
Mitch: Yes, we were able to solve a number of the ones that we mentioned before. For instance, we were able to set up a process for dimensional rating, where all the shippers knew exactly which boxes they could choose and what the sizes were so that we could get a proper rating in place.
Maria: On top of that, the reporting capabilities were excellent. We are using the reporting on top of the dimensional rate to see where our cost savings are now within the company.
Mitch: ShipERP provided us with the ability to upgrade our shipping system without needing to upgrade our SAP ECC system, which was a benefit. We were able to get USPS rating and carrier labels that we didn’t have before; we were able to integrate with our foreign trade zone, which we weren’t able to before.
Maria: And I believe it also allows us now to operate a little more seamlessly because of the fact that we don’t have an end-of-day manifesting process anymore. So there’s quite a few benefits to this upgrade.
Natalie: And you said you’ve been running about a year, correct?
Maria: Correct.
Natalie: During that time, can you talk about the support and continued process improvement planned for the future?
Mitch: Yes. We’ve gotten some very good support from the help desk that ShipERP provides. They are able to help us with any type of upgrades or integration questions that occur, and any type of carrier compliance or carrier rating questions that come up.
Maria: And to add to that, definitely the support has been great. They always remember our business processes, and we’ve been live for a year now. So to call up and say we are having an issue with this, and they know exactly our business process and they are able to really support right away for that particular issue.
We constantly have smaller projects that were are working on, so right now we are in the middle of three other enhancements of little things that we say, ‘Hey, you know what, now that we’re really running this system for a year, we want this.’ So we are continuing to make process improvements every day with their help.
Mitch: Right. And we have implemented in the US, for US and Canadian operations, but we are looking to implement globally in our European operations and in our Far East operations, and we see no reason that some of the capabilities that ShipERP has won’t help us quite a bit.
Natalie: Ok, great. And to close, Joe, I’d just like to ask you if you have any advice for other companies and some of our listeners today on evaluating solutions for supply chain?
Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. We feel we had a really good approach here with Movado and the team here. We did a really detailed discovery prior to engagement and defined all the requirements with them. It was like a mini blueprinting session, and what that allowed us to do was really understand their requirements, and it also gave them a good insight to how we perform as a partner.
I think you really want to find that right partner that provides a solution that’s really out of the box and has a lot of functionality that you can then tailor enhancements around. And as they touched on with support, you want to make sure that once a product is delivered, that it is going to be well supported and [the partner] understands your business, so when you’re calling, you can tie things together pretty quickly versus having to do too much discovery on a phone call. We pride ourselves on that.
Natalie: Well thank you very much. I really appreciate you all being here and sharing your story. Again, this is Natalie Miller with SAPinsider, and we’ve been chatting with Mitch Spaner and Maria Carbone of The Movado Group and with Joseph Cabrera of ERP Integrated Solutions.
For more information on ERP Integrated Solutions, visit www.erp-is.com.
